thread: 2012-03-13 : Indie POV pt 2: Does It Pay?
On 2012-03-16, Brand Robins wrote:
So back in 2004(ish) I took a year and wrote freelance for RPGs for the the whole time.
In that year I wrote about 1.2 million words, sold about 1 million of them, and made just over $50,000.00. Of those words less than half of them actually made it into publication—the rest were lost to publishers going under, projects changing, etc. For a real professional that may not have mattered, for me it did.
Around the same time I self-published an adventure for Mutants and Masterminds, then in its first edition. The artist (Leo Lingas) and I split profits on the book—which were well under the $5k mark. In the end we both laughed at the idea of making money on it, but it did help us both open up other doors.
At the end of that year I was a little burnt out—not from writing volume, but from not actually getting my stuff published and played. I also had little interest in doing more self publication. So I started doing freelance writing and editing outside the RPG world. For a year I made about the same amount of money as inside the RPG world. Then I made more. Eventually I got an office job being a corporate writing stooge with benefits and shit and sold out like it was going out of style.
In a theoretical world where I didn't do that, I could have made about $300,000.00 on writing for RPGs.
But that's just theoretical for several reasons:
1) When I was writing there were far more "big" publishers putting out far more work—this meant that there was always enough work to keep me hammering the keys. I could work for White Wolf or Wizards or Dream Pod 9 or Red Brick or Green Ronin or Steve Jackson or Guardians or... well you get the point right?
At this point so many of the places I used to write for are gone that I can't give an accurate picture of what the market is like. Some folks still publish, after all! However, my sense of it is that there are fewer publishers who pay 6 cents, more who churn and burn, and less prime opportunity all around. The very best still get their got, but a mid-tier player like I was then would have a hard time surviving.
2) It assumes I could keep doing it. I did it for a year and could have kept going if I really was driven to it. But fuck, who knows what would have happened at year 4?
3) If I had kept in it going through the transitions noted above, chances are good that I would have started working out a different situations for myself. Maybe I wouldn't have published my own games fully, but a semi-independent publishing arrangement like those Vincent talked about up above would have been something I'd have been looking into.
So yea, it was fun for a year, but I lacked the stuff to make it a long term go.
